THEATER REVIEW

THEATER REVIEW; Oh, to Be Back Home in Wyoming

By PETER MARKS

Published: April 19, 1999

It doesn't take a strict Freudian to figure out what's ailing Peter Emmons, the hero of ''Dream True.'' Wrenched as a boy from the home and the people he loves, and sent into the care of a rich uncle of complex inner torments, Peter spends the rest of his life trying to undo the damage of this devastatingly bad decision and recreate the nurturing cocoon of his childhood in Wyoming.

The chroniclers of Peter's tale, the composer Ricky Ian Gordon and the director Tina Landau, don't want you to fuss too much about the clinical details, either. What they have in mind in this exotic, flawed and strangely moving musical is something more daring: a melodic language for longing.

''Dream True,'' which opened last night at the Vineyard Theater, is a truly perplexing experience. The story it tells is on the self-important side, yet the way it spins it is wholly original: the first musical, perhaps, to make a conscious appeal to the subconscious. Like the dream world itself, ''Dream True'' orbits in an alternate universe where rationality takes a back seat to sensation. ''Imagine a place, but it's really more of a feeling,'' Peter (played by Jeff McCarthy) says to his wife, Madge (Judy Kuhn), at the start of the show. ''No walls. No separation between you and everything. All there is is open space.''

In the Vineyard's open space -- the set is an empty honey-colored canvas, a blank page, if you will -- Mr. Gordon, who wrote the music, and Ms. Landau, who contributed the book and lyrics, try to render this landscape of pure feeling. At times, the results are striking in their beauty, as in the gentle ballad called ''Finding Home,'' sung by Jessica Molaskey, playing the mother to the young Peter (Alex Bowen), or in ''The Best for You,'' a stirring second-act duet for Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Kuhn. All the while, Jan Hartley's lovely panoramic projections of Manhattan mornings and Big Sky evenings adorn the back wall of the stage, mural-size images out of postcard dreams.

These effects and moments are the sweet building blocks of an earnest entertainment that takes itself a little too seriously. ''Dream True'' is sometimes heartbreaking, but at all times humorless: even the darkest dreams, after all, can provide comic relief. How forgiving you are about the show's shortcomings will depend on how compelling you find the creators' conceits, and also perhaps on what else you may have seen lately.

Of the various attempts this season by New York's institutional theaters to present a more cerebral brand of musical, ''Dream True'' is the most intriguing. As this is the first full-fledged musical by Mr. Gordon, a composer of art songs and operas, one hopes the transitional work represents for him just an opening act.

Mr. Gordon and Ms. Landau, who collaborated with the composer Adam Guettel on the musically compelling ''Floyd Collins'' at Playwrights Horizons a few years ago, have said the inspiration for ''Dream True'' is ''Peter Ibbetson,'' a novel by George du Maurier in which two people experience the same dreams. In ''Dream True,'' this supernatural phenomenon expresses not only a metaphysical link between characters, but also an abiding emotional conjunction, a bond that proves both more ambiguous and meaningful than anything conjured in dreams. (Surprisingly, though, Ms. Landau does not come up with an interesting way of dramatizing this dual-dreaming concept.)

The link is forged in childhood between Peter and Vernon Dexter (Jase Blankfort as a boy; Daniel Jenkins as a man), who both are growing up fatherless in Wyoming. Although their love for each other evolves on different planes -- Verne, it will be revealed, is gay -- it is the sustaining connection of their youth. When Peter's mother makes the confounding decision to send him East to live with his harsh, insensitive uncle Howard (Steven Skybell) -- a psychiatrist, no less -- the breakup is shattering (and nicely played both by young Mr. Bowen and Mr. Blankfort).

The musical skips rapidly to Peter's adulthood in New York, where, working as an architect, the spillover from the traumas of his early life collects and conspires to ruin him. (An oddly pizazzy, and out of place, pastiche number, ''The Best Years of Our Lives,'' provides an introduction to postwar Manhattan.) Peter's own turmoil, his desire for some semblance of inner peace, is what drives the narrative; in ''Space,'' a clever ensemble number led by the spirited Mr. McCarthy, Peter reimagines the firm's plans for a new building as his own personal vision of an ideal shelter, an image of Wyoming where ''the world was our home/And the stone was our floor/And the sky was our dome.''

Many of the details in ''Dream True'' are fuzzy; it's unclear, for instance, why Peter never returns to Wyoming until he learns his mother is deathly ill. But this may be because Mr. Gordon and Ms. Landau are preoccupied by the relationship between Peter and Vernon, which is renewed when they run into each other in New York. And when the composer and the director focus their attentions on the friends' almost mystical bond, the musical's deep reservoir of feeling is tapped.

Enriched by Jonathan Tunick's evocative orchestrations, Mr. Gordon's score captures the abundant heartache of Peter's search and curious escape from life. Mr. Jenkins's rendition of the show's penultimate song, the poignant anthem ''We Will Always Walk Together,'' is a fully satisfying summation of the power of their eternal comradeship.

Although the material sometimes fails them, Mr. Jenkins, Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Kuhn are in fine voice and deliver sensitive portrayals. As the parental figures in Peter's life, Ms. Molaskey is soulful and winning, while Mr. Skybell, in the difficult role of the heavy, pushes it way beyond the tolerable. The character is a demonstration of one of the ways in which this promising musical veers off, flat-footed, in some uninviting directions.